Eva Figes already has a distinguished reputation. She extends her range again with B in which she assaults that most elusive of themes, the creative process itself: the relationship between experience and the art which it triggers. While admiring her intent and her talent, I have to confess to finding the book more bleakly schematic and less palatable than, for instance, her earlier brilliant Winter Journey, which was a major triumph of sustained imaginative writing….

The new work is far more intellectually ambitious, relying on intricacy of structure, a complicated sequence of trick mirrors, takes and retakes of scene and incident, more than on sustained imagery or verbal felicity…. The naked, stripped style sometimes hints of some lack of grip on the structure: invention and imagination are somehow not quite in tune. But the uncompromising intelligence of the whole is admirable.

Mary Borg, "Art of Money," in New...